Cory Booker on Welfare & Poverty

Resided in housing project after law school, to help tenants

Long before he became America's most influential mayor, Booker began his career as an exercise in self-imposed humility.

At the age of 28, with prestigious clerkships and six-figure salaries on the horizon, he moved into a "penthouse apartment" in
Brick Towers, one of Newark's worst housing projects, with the aim of helping tenants.

Booker lived there for eight years, through winters without heat or hot water, often walking up and down the fifteen flights of stairs when the elevator wasn't working.
Gayle King, the CBS morning-news anchor who has become a close friend, says that by the time she started visiting him there a few years later, he no longer noticed the smell of urine in the hallways.

Assist beneficiaries with earned income tax credit

We aggressively stepped up our work with the earned income tax credit, even establishing a free tax center in City Hall, leading to savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in filing fees and assisting in putting millions of previously unclaimed
dollars into the pockets of residents. And now with the Governor's expansion of eligibility for the state EITC, hundreds, if not thousands, more Newarkers can claim additional benefits.